I Was America's Favorite Immigrant Ogre for One Hundred Years And I Never Became a Terrorist; I Wrote a Book Instead

I did a lot of driving on December 25, 2015. National
Public Radio offered wall-to-wall coverage of a new power narrative. Americans,
US taxpayer-funded NPR drilled into its Christmas day listeners, are an
ignorant, violent, lynch mob. Muslims are their potential victims. One thing
and one thing only might inspire Muslims to become terrorists: Christian
Americans saying mean things.

NPR did not attempt to sell this narrative in the old
school tones of voice-of-God journalists broadcasting who-what-when-where-why style
news accounts. Stentorian newsmen would immediately activate alarms implanted in
listeners during their college classes on sticking it to the man, fighting the
power, and questioning authority.

Rather, the Muslims-as-victims narrative was entwined
into heartwarming stories told by seductively voiced women distributing cookie
recipes. It was the unquestioned premise of curl-up-around-the-fire
storytelling. It was the relevant unstated undergirding of irrelevant,
cardboard-prop "news." Good propaganda is obvious. Excellent
propaganda hides in plain sight, and insinuates itself, like a virus, into
every organ, including the heart.

On Christmas day alone, NPR features on the hateful American
/ Muslim victim theme included the following three broadcasts.

Award-winning author Diana Abu-Jaber has
called America "the belly of the beast," "insular," and
has declared that "America is not the final word." On NPR Abu-Jaber wove
a homespun family tale, accompanied by a
recipe, of cookies baked by a bigoted American Catholic shrew and
appreciatively consumed by her model Muslim son-in-law. "Gram didn't
approve of her Jordanian son-in-law. She saw him as an interloper. He was this
Muslim menace … She would just pick at him and peck [sic] him and … then
eventually he'd break down and he'd jump into the fray. 'You'd probably run
around like a bunch of savages waving turkey legs.' And my father would say 'Well,
actually, the Muslims invented civilization.'"

The NPR storytelling program "The Moth"
included Khaled Latif's "Shattered
Silence." Latif alleged, without evidence, that he has overheard
Americans say, "We need to get all the Muslims together, and send them out
of the country, because they are all violent, and they are all terrorists."
He also alleged, again without evidence, that an American woman tried to push
him down a flight of stairs. "It was a really, really tough
situation," he moaned helplessly. Latif spoke quietly of the incredible
courage Muslims must muster to live among violent American bigots. Latif made
no reference to any hadith or Koran verse that might cause Americans to look
askance at fealty to Koranic commands. Latif's absence of evidence matters;
Muslims have faked
hate crimes.

In rural Wyoming,
NPR listeners learned, "anti-Muslim rhetoric" from a "Catholic
ex-Marine" is terrorizing defenseless Muslims "with deep roots in the
area … they've been in Wyoming since 1960s" The broadcast's antagonist,
the Catholic, is a fool. He fears a "problem" with Islam that
"can't happen" in Wyoming, according to NPR. The Catholic has stirred
up locals who "belittled Muslims and even threatened to throw bacon at the
mosque." We all know how many tragic deaths have resulted when bacon has
been used as an anti-architecture projectile. "The rhetoric has gotten so
bad, so negative, so harsh." NPR assured its listeners that there is no
significant difference between Islam and other belief systems. "It's not
entirely unlike what I've experienced when I've gone to church … [the Catholic]
has no reason to be nervous … Everyone wants to be peaceful and coincide [sic] with
each other."

In mid-December, 2015, Nobel Peace Prize winner MalalaYousafzai
said that it's "really tragic that you hear these comments which are full
of hatred, full of this ideology of being discriminative towards others … The
more you speak about Islam and against all Muslims, the more terrorists we
create … If your intention is to stop terrorism, do not try to blame the whole
population of Muslims for it because it cannot stop terrorism. It will radicalize
more terrorists."

The power narrative is wrong. Jihadis commit violence for
the reason jihadis have always given for committing violence. They are
following the commands found
in the Koran and hadiths.

Further, being the butt of bigotry does not compel anyone
to commit violent acts. I know. I am the butt of bigotry far worse than Malala
Yousafzai, Diana Abu-Jaber, Imam Khaled Latif, or Aftab Khan have ever faced.

I, and others like me, have been America's favorite ogre.
We were denounced in Congress by powerful scientists who defined us as quite
literally subhuman. We were mocked and demonized in high and low culture. We
didn't become terrorists. We put our shoulders to the wheel and we worked to
make America great.

My very white, European, Christian mother entered the United
States through a loophole. American law declared her racially inferior and
unfit for entry to the US.

Let's talk about the real facts of American immigration.
We need to go back in time to 1859. Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species. The book had
unintended consequences. E. B. Tylor, the "father of anthropology,"
was among many scholars who applied a Darwin-inspired evolutionary paradigm to
human cultural differences. Hunter-gatherers were analogous to less evolved
species. Margaret
Sanger compared Aborigines to chimps. European peasants like my mother were
somewhere in the middle of the evolutionary ladder – higher than Aborigines but
not fully human. A refined Victorian gentleman occupied the evolutionary
pinnacle.

As Social Darwinism reached its height, a new and massive
immigration was reaching America's shores. Eastern and Southern European peasants
had relatively recently been freed from serfdom: 1848 in the Austrian Empire
and 1861 in the Russian. "Freedom" often meant the lord of the manor
expelling serfs from land. America was industrializing. Industrialists invited
in this cheap labor.

Before the c. 1880-1924 immigration, almost all white
Americans had roots in Northern and Western Europe. Peasant immigrants from
countries like Poland and Italy were repellent to Americans. They were dirty,
illiterate, and untamed. They were, in still largely Protestant America,
Catholic, Orthodox, or Ashkenazi Jewish. They were physically strong and
uncomplaining, and undercut American workers' wages. They solved their problems
with alcohol and fists and they frightened people.

Industrialists used them up. Given the inexhaustible
supply, they were less valuable than slaves. The largely Irish Catholic Church
refused them seats in pews. Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood,
wanted them sterilized. Both Princeton Professor Carl
Brigham, the inventor of what would become the Scholastic Aptitude Test, and
Robert Yerkes, professor at Harvard and Yale and founder of the National
Primate Research Center, singled out Poles as racially deficient and argued
against allowing them into the US. Leaders at the Bronx Zoo and the Museum of
Natural History, Henry Fairfield Osborn and Madison Grant, published
bestselling and well-reviewed books and articles "proving"
immigrants' racial inferiority. Hitler said that Grant had written his "bible."
Bestselling novelist Kenneth Roberts published numerous anti-immigrant pieces
in the popular and influential Saturday
Evening Post, famous for its beloved Normal Rockwell covers. A typical
passage:

"For the most part they are dirty people, and the
stench that rises from them is strong enough to be used as a substitute for
gasoline. The workers in the consulate frequently become ill from the odor ... [they
are] backward, illiterate, dirty, thickheaded peasants … it is no more possible
to make Americans out of a great many of them than it is possible to make a
racehorse out of a pug dog … These people are inconceivably backward. They wear
clothing that seems to have ripened on them for years, and they sleep in
wretched hovels with sheep and cows and pigs and poultry scattered among them."

This quote is a tiny fraction of the avalanche of hate
speech that America produced regarding people like my mother. Similar material
appeared in virtually every major secular, general interest publication in the
US, as well as scientific journals and government publications, including the
"liberal" media like the New
York Times and The Atlantic Monthly.

In 1924, Congress passed a law to keep Eastern and
Southern Europeans out of the US because of their racial inferiority. During
the Holocaust, Assistant Secretary of State and FDR friend Breckinridge
Long used his power to prevent "all that Slav population of Eastern
Europe" from entering the United States. Long denounced them as
"entirely unfit to become citizens of this country … they are lawless,
scheming, defiant, and in many ways unassimilable." Even immigrants
running from Hitler were denied entry.

Before World War II, the West betrayed my mother's natal
country, Czechoslovakia, at Munich. During the war, America supported the
Soviet lie that the Katyn Massacre of 22,000 Polish army officers had been
carried out by the Nazis – it wasn't – it was the work of America's Soviet
ally. Roosevelt personally participated in the suppression of this truth. As
the war was ending, at the Yalta Conference, FDR certified Stalin's domination
of Eastern Europe. The Cold War, in my mother's telling, reached its nadir when
Americans used radio to urge Hungarians to rebel, and then stood by watching as
Russian tanks mowed them down.

For the first half of the twentieth century, Poles and
other Eastern Europeans were officially deemed racially inferior because we
were, allegedly, thick, stupid peasants. For the second half of the twentieth
century, Slavs were America's favorite foreign bad guys. We were Rocky and Bullwinkle's
Boris Badenov and Natasha. We were the black-clad spy in Mad magazine's spy v
spy. We were Rosa Klebb, or the Russian Mafia, or Irina Sedova, to James Bond. We
were Ivan Drago to Rocky Balboa. We were Stanley Kowalski to Blanch Dubois. We
were the enemy puppet master behind North Vietnam, Cuba, and Nicaragua. When
kids played war, we had to die.

As American fought the Cold War on the ground and the
movie screen, America needed to justify that Poland, the country that fought
the Nazis first, last, and hardest was abandoned at Yalta. Denigration worsened
in the post-war period. Here's the first Polak joke I ever heard: "How do
you know if your house has been robbed by a Polak? The garbage can is empty and
the dog is pregnant." Kids in schoolyards, Johnny Carson, and the New Yorker could and did tell Polak
jokes with impunity. The Polak joke retained the essence of the Social
Darwinist racism of the early twentieth century. Not just Poles, but all
Eastern European peasants were thuggish brutes.

Through the Marshall Plan, post-Nazi Germany was redeemed
and re-embraced into the West. The hostility Americans felt about Nazism was
shifted eastward. In recent films and popular press articles, Polish peasants
take on the burden of guilt that properly belongs to Nazi Germany. We have
become the bad guys in World War II. That we fought the bad guys while
Americans were at home watching the war from afar is forgotten, or obscured in
jokes about Polish armies – a joke
made recently by an American university president.

This isn't just my story; it isn't just the Polish story.

The largest mass lynching in American history took place
in 1891; the victims were Italians. During World War II, baseball legend Joe
Dimaggio's father's fishing boat was confiscated. He was born in Italy; that
alone marked him as a threat to America's navy. Frank Sinatra's father took the
name, now both poignant and laughable, of "Marty O'Brien." Band
leader Harry James ordered Sinatra, then young, desperate, and unknown, to
change his surname to "Satin." Sinatra's "eyes went cold,"
an eyewitness reported. He said to James, "You want the singer, take the
name," and walked away.

The American
Anthropologist, the flagship journal of its field, published, in 1913, an
article stating that "the Jewish nose" may be the result of
"excessive sexual indulgence … indignation … disgust, contempt, and
disdain, scorn … [or the acknowledgment of] guilt … a snarl, sneer, and
defiance … a menacing attitude, with pride … the peculiar position of the Jew
for centuries may account for the Jewish nose." As late as 1986, Supreme
Court Justice William Rehnquist was asked about restrictive covenants on his
property that forbade it being resold to "members of the Hebrew
race."

In the face of this epic bigotry, from every level of
society, the c. 1880-1924 immigrants and their descendants did not become
terrorists. It's possible that Sacco and Vanzetti did. Their guilt or innocence
is still debated. Leon Czolgosz did, but he was a one-man operation, not part
of any trend of Polish-American presidential assassins. Emma Goldman did, and
it's possible that the Haymarket bomber did – but that bomber remains unknown,
and he may have been an agent provocateur. The vast majority of us did not
become terrorists, nor did we consider terrorism.

We worked hard to prove the naysayers wrong. We joined
the armed forces and fought for America, as did my Polish-American father, as
had Tadeusz Kosciuszko and Casimir Pulaski long before him.

We founded the Kosciuszko Foundation, the Sons of Italy,
the Anti-Defamation League. Poles did everything they could to distance
themselves from the brute stereotype, like hosting Chopin recitals and debutante
balls.

Jews founded universities like Brandeis and hospitals
like Mount Sinai and made essential contributions to that most American of
products, Hollywood.
Catholics similarly founded universities like Notre Dame and too many grammar
schools and hospitals to mention.

On September 12, 1960, John F. Kennedy delivered his
famous speech
to the Greater Houston Ministerial Association. Kennedy knew the Protestants'
worst suspicions of Catholics, and he addressed those suspicions head-on. "I
believe in an America where the separation of church and state is absolute,
where no Catholic prelate would tell the president how to act." He never
cited Protestant prejudice as a carte blanche for Catholics to be anti-social,
never mind violent.

What did I do with my heartache? I wrote a book, Bieganski, analyzing negative stereotypes of Eastern Europeans. In the
countless hours I spent researching that book, I read many extravagantly
hateful attacks on peasant immigrants like my mother. I read many responses
from immigrants. I interviewed dozens of immigrants and their children. I never,
not once, encountered a single response from an immigrant or an immigrant
offspring saying, paraphrase, "They say mean things about us so let's
become terrorists."

Rather, the immigrant responses I read were more like
this passage from Thomas Bell's Out of this Furnace. A Slovak steel mill worker says,

"If we were to sing some of our songs and explain
what they were about – would it surprise them to learn that we sang about such
things and had such feelings? If we told them how we lived in the old country,
how we worked the land, the crops we grew, the little money we saw from one
year's end to another, our holidays and festivals – would they realize that
even though we spoke different languages we were still men like themselves,
with the same troubles, the same hopes and dreams? I hoped that we might learn
to respect one another, that we might even become friends."

One cannot imagine Tashfeen Malik, Syed Farook, Dzhokhar
Tsarnaev, Mohamed Osman Mohamud, Nidal Hasan, Anwar al-Awlaki, or any number of
other American jihadis writing a paragraph anything like Bell's, above. One
can't imagine Linda Sarsour or a CAIR spokesman writing that passage, either.

Why didn't 1880-1924 immigrants and their offspring turn
against America, in spite of all the very real harm that was done to us? Maybe
because we come from a religious tradition that states that vengeance is God's alone.
Maybe because of what Alan Dundes called "The future orientation of
American culture." We were determined to build a better future, not wallow
in the slights of the past. Maybe because we recognized the truth encapsulated
in this quote from Martin Luther King Jr, "Darkness cannot drive out
darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do
that." Many of my informants told me that their or their ancestors'
suffering inspired them to work to make the world a better place. Maybe it was
sheer pragmatism. My father proudly acknowledged Poland's status as the
"Christ of nations," that repeatedly fought invading hoards from the
east and south. But in Poland, my father pointed out, peasants like us could
count on a smoke-filled one-room hut, the lord of the manor's fist, and a bowl
of cabbage soup. In America, we could be president. "America is the
greatest country in the world," he insisted. What's good about America is
unique to America and if we devoted our energy to focusing on the bad rather than
participating in the good, we'd be cutting off our nose to spite our own face.
Even peasants realize that soiling your own nest is the idiot's choice.

I am on
record as opposing anti-Muslim bigotry. NPR-style "Muslims as
victims" propaganda, in an absence of a serious discussion of jihad, will
exacerbate, not relieve, tensions. In school curricula, in political rhetoric,
in journalism and in sermons, it is well past time for honest discussion of
jihad.

Yes leave it to Left-Wing NPR....to SELECTIVELY defend groups of people against Bigotry...while in the past it has engaged in bigotry/Anti-Polish hate-jokes against Polish people. This has been the narrative of much of the Hypocritical Left-Wing media for decades...like NBC-TV, CBS-TV and ABC-TV. They are always so quick to defend groups SELECTIVELY like Jews, Blacks, Hispanics from bigotry....WHILE for decades they (an element within them) have pushed Nazi Anti "Polish jokes" COAST-TO-COAST. Google: "NBC-TV Anti-Polish Bigotry" and "CBS-TV Anti-Polish Bigotry". To be fair...NOT everyone at these TV networks are Anti-Polish....but indeed there has been a virulent Anti-Polish element within these networks that has RAISED ITS UGLY HEAD from time to time.

On a more positive note, there are Polish American Football Players like Patriot's Tight End Rob Gronkowski and Kicker Stephen Gostkowski who get fair coverage from the media about their accomplishments.

Also...if it is possible....watch today Sunday Jan. 24..CBS-TV ... the NFL Patriots vs Broncos game at 3PM (preview is right before game at 2:30). Patriots Rob Gronkowski and Stephen Gostkowski will be playing. It should be a good game.

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